BIG SAWS AND LITTLE CHISELS

The familiar carpenter’s handsaw, with a blade wide and stiff enough to cut on the push stroke, was not unknown in colonial times and Dickinson apparently had one. But various kinds of frame and back saws were much more common. Dickinson had one large frame saw—its valuation at £5 indicates it must have been of good quality as well as good-sized—that was probably a pit saw. This was a two-man affair for ripping logs into boards. A whip saw (one of these was also listed) was like a modern two-man crosscut saw.

Dickinson also possessed a small frame saw, a bow saw, a “tenant” (tenon) saw, a panel saw, a sash saw, and three dovetail saws. The latter three, called “dovetailed” in the inventory, were back saws with short blades and very fine teeth. The tenon saw might have been either a back or a frame saw, as both varieties were used in cutting the tenons for mortise joints. Vagaries in craft nomenclature leave us in doubt about the precise appearance of many tools, including Dickinson’s panel and sash saws.

Except that it was doubtless made of wood rather than steel and had a somewhat different chuck, Dickinson’s bit stock would have resembled the boring brace in any modern tool box. His “20 bitts,” however, probably lacked the spiral shank of their present descendants and thus required considerably more skill on the part of the user to bore a straight hole.

Chisels and gouges, of which Dickinson had a total of 53, have not changed in appearance or structure over many centuries. Like other tools, they come in different shapes and sizes and some possess special designs for special purposes.Of Dickinson’s collection, 47 were carving chisels and gouges, which argues that he did his own carving. However, one of the two carvers known to have worked in eighteenth-century Williamsburg was George Hamilton, a journeyman in Dickinson’s shop in 1774. The other, James Wilson, worked with or for Anthony Hay some twenty years earlier.

Dickinson’s “6 Morticeing Chissels”—along with his “tenant” saw and fitting planes—serve as reminders that the basic techniques of cabinetmaking have likewise changed little through the years.

In the making of an article of furniture the component pieces must be attached to each other at various points: sometimes side-by-side with grain running parallel, sometimes end to end, or end into side, or crossing one another. At each juncture the cabinetmaker had his choice of a number of joints that were appropriate in such a situation. The eighteenth-century craftsman knew them all and was skilled in the making of all those used today: butt, lap, rabbet, tongue and groove, mortise and tenon, mitre, dado, dovetail, and their numerous combinations and variations.

In cabinetmaking the most useful joints are undoubtedly the mortise and tenon and the dovetail, the former for joining structural members at right angles, the latter for holding together adjacent sides of drawers, chests, boxes, and the like. Both kinds of joints are very strong if well made, weak if poorly fitted. Skill and experience, thus, were (and are) prerequisite to good furniture making.

Some veneering appeared on colonial furniture at least by the beginning of the eighteenth century. But it was not widely practiced, in part because fine cabinet woods were relatively cheap and in part, no doubt, because making veneer by hand required a good deal of skilled work and labor was relatively expensive. In any case, it was the large and otherwise unadorned surfaces of Hepplewhite andSheraton furniture that invited matched veneering. Since these fashions came to America after the Revolution and after Williamsburg had passed its apogee, Williamsburg cabinetmakers probably did little if any veneering.

Two men with a good-sized but fine-toothed frame saw here cut a log into thin slices of veneer.ROUBO

Applying a finish to woodwork is an ancient art and has always served two purposes: to give the wood a protective coating and to enhance its appearance. By the eighteenth century the techniques for applying several different kinds of finish were well understood and widely used in the colonial cabinet shop.

Painting, generally limited to the cheapest sort of furniture, was little practiced by quality cabinetmakers. The imitation of oriental lacquer called japanning was not common in the colonies, and in any case was the province of the japanner. The cabinetmaker favored oil, wax, or varnish finishes to produce a hard, transparent, and glassy-smooth surface.

To prepare the surface of the wood, colonial cabinetmakers had planes, scrapers, glasspaper, and sandpaper—the latter two available by the late eighteenth century and probably much before that. Stains were used to enrich thenatural color and emphasize the grain of the wood, and pulverized chalk, plaster of Paris, or the like was used to fill the pores of coarse-grained woods.

Wax, usually beeswax melted and mixed with turpentine, was cheap, easy to apply, and easy to renew. Rubbed on, allowed to dry, and polished with a cloth—and repeated by generations of industrious housewives or servants—wax produced a beautiful finish, especially on mahogany or cherry.

Linseed oil thinned with turpentine was frequently the only finish applied on these and other hard, close-grained woods. The mixture was applied generously, allowed to stand for several hours, and wiped off. The surface was then rubbed for hours with the bare hand or a piece of cloth or felt, and the process was repeated again and again until the wood showed a fine rich sheen.

As the wood absorbed the oil its grain rose slightly and had to be smoothed down again between coats. Sheraton advocated a technique that combined filling, oiling, and smoothing in one operation: the oil was poured on and allowed to stand, then sprinkled with fine brick dust and rubbed with a cloth. The brick dust filled the grain and combined with the oil to form a putty that was mildly abrasive and would, Sheraton said, “secure a fine polish by continued rubbing.”

Eighteenth-century cabinetmakers employed both oil varnishes and spirit varnishes. The former was made by dissolving a natural resin—copal was one of the most commonly used—in hot oil and thinning with turpentine. The only spirit varnish of importance was that made of lac—in the form of stick lac, seed lac, or shell lac—dissolved in alcohol. (Lac is the resinous secretion of an insect encrusted on the twigs of certain East Indian trees.)

The application of a varnish required less labor than wax or oil but more skill. It was flowed on, allowed to dry, and rubbed down with a fine abrasive. This was repeated with as many coats as might be necessary, and wax applied as afinal coat. Eighteenth-century Anglo-American cabinetmakers seem to have preferred lac varnishes, particularly shellac, for walnut furniture, wax and oil finishes for mahogany.

The elegant grounds of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg seem at first glance a most unlikely site for a cabinetmaker’s shop, especially in the time of Lord Dunmore. His Majesty’s last and unlamented viceroy in Virginia was no basement do-it-yourselfer. But after the Revolution his claim for the value of lost possessions included “A quantity of Mahogany and other Woods; with tools for four Cabinet Makers.”

Although Dunmore’s tools and lumber were probably destined for the plantation he was seating near Warm Springs as a private venture, the possibility cannot be dismissed that some furniture work was done at the Palace. At one spot on the grounds several items of cabinet hardware have been excavated. And the amount of furniture in an establishment as big as the Palace could no doubt have kept a man busy just repairing the everyday wear and tear.

Whatever the situation under the royal governors, however, the practice in 1776 was to have such work done in the shops of the town’s private entrepreneurs. When Patrick Henry was about to take up residence as the independent commonwealth’s first chief executive, the state government issued warrants to several Williamsburg cabinetmakers for making or repairing Palace furniture. Honey and Harrocks received a little more than £19 for mending 28 chairs there; £21 went to a certain Richard Booker (about whose identity there remains great uncertainty) for making some chairs; and our friend Edmund Dickinson took in £92 “for furniture furnished the Pallace.”

Judging by Bucktrout’s charge of £25 per dozen for straight chairs and £16 for a mahogany desk and bookcase, Dickinson was dealing with something on the order of35 chairs or their equivalent in other kinds of furniture. It would appear that his shop, the same one where Anthony Hay and Benjamin Bucktrout had earlier plied their craft, was the largest such establishment in Williamsburg at the time. It has now been reconstructed, its dimensions precisely fixed by surviving foundations, and furnished as an operating craft shop according to indications of the Dickinson inventory, archaeological findings on the site, and other information.

This eighteenth-century woodworker’s bench resembles its twentieth-century counterpart in every essential feature of construction and equipment, though differing in various details.ROUBO

The original shop was built about 1750 on the bank of the small stream that still flows through the NicholsonStreet property. Hay bought it in 1756 and some ten years later built an addition on piers over the stream. His reason for this seemingly awkward arrangement cannot now be ascertained. No evidence indicates that he ever installed a water wheel, and in any event the stream’s flow could have operated a lathe only in the very wettest weather.

It’s an ill waterway, however, that flows nobody good! This one served a double end. In the first place, it provided a convenient place for the cabinetmakers’ apprentices to dump the trash that accumulated in the shop. And in the second place, the damp silt of the stream bed effectively preserved that trash against decay, transforming it into a twentieth-century treasure trove for today’s archaeologists.

Mention has already been made of the woodworking tools and fragments of cabinet hardware excavated at the site of the shop. Diggers also found a few component pieces of a table and chairs. Indeed the Anthony Hay shop, house, kitchen, and well have proved to be the richest archaeological dig in Williamsburg. Besides cabinet items, the colonial artifacts include domestic glass and ceramic wares, harness hardware, shoe buckles, garden tools, table utensils, and a large number of gun flints. The last, along with bits of several weapons, recall the period during the Revolution when the shop was converted into an armory.

The formal duties of an apprentice and his master toward each other were spelled out in an indenture signed by each when the apprenticeship began. Dickinson was probably an apprentice to Hay and may have been a journeyman employee of Bucktrout in the same shop before himself becoming its master. In turn, Dickinson took on an apprentice by the name of James Tyrie who would help him and be taught the cabinetmaking craft. In the agreement between them the master undertook that:

... his said Apprentice in the same art of a Cabinet Maker which he useth by the best means that he canshall teach and instruct or cause to be taught and instructed finding unto the said Apprentice sufficient Meat Drink Washing Lodging &c during the said term of five years.

For his part, Tyrie pledged that he:

... his said Master shall faithfully serve his secrets keep his lawful commands every where gladly do, he shall do no damage to his said Master nor see to be done of others, but that he to his power shall let or forth with give warning to his said Master of the same he shall not waste the Goods of his said Master nor lend them unlawfully to any he shall not commit fornication nor contract Matrimony within the said term He shall not play at Cards Dice Tables or any other unlawful Games whereby his said Master may have any loss, with his own Goods or others during the said term, without Licence of his said Master He shall neither buy nor sell He shall not Haunt Taverns nor Play Houses nor absent himself from his said Masters Service Day nor Night unlawfully But in all things as a faithful Apprentice he shall Behave himself towards his said Master and all his, during the said term.

What happened to Tyrie we do not know. Perhaps the coming of the War for Independence holds the key to his destiny; perhaps he, like many another apprentice, ran away from his master. One of Bucktrout’s apprentices, David Davis, took off one day wearing a whole new suit of clothing and new shoes. The important circumstance, however, was that an apprenticeship of up to seven years was the normal—indeed the only—way for a boy to gain entry into the business world. It was also the normal source to the master of a constantly renewed supply of cheap, unskilled labor.

Artifacts from the site of Anthony Hay’s cabinetmaking shop: (1) unfinished table leg, walnut; (2) fragment of an oboe, boxwood with brass stops; (3) crest rail of a chair in the Chippendale style; (4 to 12) cabinet fittings, brass, including ornamental column base from a tall case clock (6) and a chair caster (7); and (13 to 18) carpenter’s tools, all of iron and heavily encrusted with rust. Redrawn from photographs.

Three other sources of help were available to him: wage-earning journeymen, indentured servants, and slaves—all of whom might be skilled workers in the craft. Williamsburg cabinetmakers advertised from time to time in theVirginia Gazettefor the services of capable journeymen, a circumstance that argues both the need of the proprietors for help and the availability of potential helpers. As to any specific workers they may have acquired in this category, the record is silent.

Other advertisements listed joiners and cabinetmakers among the cargoes of ships bringing indentured passengers whose services for a period were to be auctioned off to the highest bidder or sold for a fixed fee. But no evidence has been found that any Williamsburg cabinetmaker augmented his work force with indentured servants.

Formal apprenticeship of Negro slaves was not uncommon, and many examples can be cited of Negroes who became skilled workers even without the formality. The largest number in and around Williamsburg seem to have been carpenters, but other crafts had skilled and semi-skilled practitioners who were slaves. Peter Scott, for example, owned “two Negroes, bred to the Business of a Cabinet-maker,” and Anthony Hay owned a “very good” slave cabinetmaker even after he turned from that trade to innkeeping. However, no instance has come to light from colonial Virginia of a Negro, even a freedman, who became a journeyman or master of any craft.

As we have seen, Virginians who wanted fine furniture probably ordered it from England. But competition from across the Atlantic was not the local cabinetmaker’s only burden. A very large amount of furniture left the busy shops of New England, New York, and Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, consigned to southern ports or the West Indies. No precise figure can be stated for the size or importance of this coastwise trade, or for its importance in the life of Williamsburg cabinetmakers; it could not have made things easier for them.

The interior of an eighteenth-century French marquetry establishment, with the workers using various tools. At the left is a type of vise called a “donkey”; against the wall may be seen a large cabinet bookcase, a slant-top desk, and a chest of drawers. These would have been made in a cabinet shop and brought here for inlay decoration.DIDEROT

Whether outside competition was the cause, or simply the narrowness of the Virginia market in the first place, Williamsburg cabinetmakers—like the practitioners of other crafts—found ways to augment their incomes. Anthony Hay became proprietor of the Raleigh Tavern and Benjamin Bucktrout turned storekeeper and state functionary.

The change in Hay’s case was clearly not motivated by poverty; he must have been well-to-do or at any rate well respected to have acquired backing, perhaps to the extent of £4000, to buy the Raleigh—and without selling his house, cabinet shop, and timber yard.

Coffin-making was a normal part of the cabinetmaker’s business, and many cabinetmakers took what was the logical next step of serving also as funeral directors. When the popular Lord Botetourt, Governor Dunmore’s predecessor, died in Williamsburg, two of the town’s cabinetmakerswere involved in the burial. Joshua Kendall made the three nested coffins, and Benjamin Bucktrout provided the hearse and four days worth of attendance in connection with the ceremonies.

Bucktrout was one of the several Williamsburg cabinetmakers who did upholstering; he also sold upholstery materials in his shop on Francis Street. By 1774 that shop had become a store—stocked with beer, cheese, spices, woolens and cottons, hats, boots, women’s and children’s shoes, gloves, guns, pistols, saddles, whips, and a number of other things—and Bucktrout had to advertise that he still did cabinet work.

Eventually, however, Bucktrout seems to have abandoned his own business to put all his time and effort into serving as purveyor to the public hospitals of the state. A powder mill he devised and erected in or near Williamsburg early in the Revolution did not function for lack of saltpeter, and Bucktrout’s efforts to gain compensation or subsidy from the Assembly were in vain.

Whether or not he turned Tory in 1779—and there is one accusation on record to that effect—he was back in Williamsburg soon after the defeat of Cornwallis, and remained a resident of the town for another 30 years. In 1804 he was appointed town surveyor, thereby capping a career that for versatility was matched by its virility. The widower Bucktrout must have been about 60 years old when, in 1797, he took to wife a young girl by the name of Mary Bruce. Before his death in 1812 she bore him four children, the second receiving the name Horatio.

A century and a quarter later—in 1928—another Horatio Bucktrout sold the family undertaking establishment and thus brought to an end the Bucktrout saga in Williamsburg. The story of cabinetmaking as an active eighteenth-century craft in Williamsburg had ended long before, of course.

In addition to Benjamin Bucktrout, Edmund Dickinson, Anthony Hay, and Peter Scott—all of whom have been discussed at some length in the preceding pages—the following are believed to complete the list of known Williamsburg cabinetmakers in the eighteenth century.

Richard Booker.A cabinetmaker in Williamsburg in 1773, and for three or fours years thereafter, and again or still in 1792. The records are full of men by that name, and their identities are difficult to sort out.

John Crump.Was associated in 1775 with Richard Booker, in what capacity is not known.

Richard Harrocks.Had a shop in 1776 and 1777, part of the time in partnership with James Honey.

James Honey(died 1787). Was a house joiner rather than cabinetmaker, but was briefly in the cabinetmaking business with Richard Harrocks.

William Kennedy.In 1769 was briefly a partner of Bucktrout; then had his own business in the Pelham shop on Francis Street, but his activities there are unknown.

Matthew Moody, Jr.Had cabinetmaking business around 1764 or 1765 and later was a carpenter.

John Ormeston.Was in Williamsburg from 1763 to 1766; may have been a cabinetmaker or a riding-chair maker or both.

Thomas Orton(died 1778). His name appears in the records once with the word cabinetmaker appended to it.

James Spiers.Coachmaker, cabinetmaker, upholsterer from 1744 to about 1755; his shop may have been near that of Scott.

The number of books in print on how to make furniture is almost endless; the determined do-it-yourself antique-maker will want to start with Joseph Moxon,Mechanick Exercises(London, 1683); Thomas Chippendale,Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director(London, 1754); and Thomas Sheraton,The Cabinet Dictionary(London, 1803). Among more recent publications, space permits mention of three—not necessarily the best or most complete, but at least representative: F. E. Hoard and A. W. Marlow,The Cabinetmaker’s Treasury(New York, Macmillan, 1952); Lester Margon,Construction of American Furniture Treasures(New York, Home Craftsman, 1949); and Raymond F. Yates,Antique Reproductions for the Home Craftsman(New York, Whittlesey House, 1950). The last named includes a discussion of old-time hand tools and techniques; although not strictly concerned with cabinetmaking tools, Henry D. Mercer,Ancient Carpenters’ Tools(Doylestown, Pa., Doylestown Hist. Soc., 1929) is very informative.

On the historical aspects of furniture and fashion there are, again, a multitude of books; a good start can be made with Frank Davis,A Picture History of Furniture(New York, Macmillan, 1958) and Hermann Schmitz, editor,The Encyclopedia of Furniture(New York, Praeger, 1957, new edition). On English seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles Ralph Edwards and L. G. G. Ramsey, editors,Connoisseur Period Guides(London, The Connoisseur, 1956et seq.) and Robert W. Symonds,Furniture Making in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England(London, The Connoisseur, 1955) are indispensable. JosephDowns,American Furniture, Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods(New York, Macmillan, 1952) and Albert Sack,Fine Points of Furniture(New York, Crown, 1950) are essential for the colonial story in furniture design.

Local developments—Virginia and elsewhere—will be found in the article by Helen Comstock, “Furniture of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky,” inAntiques Magazine, LXI (January, 1952). That magazine’s recent compilation entitledThe Antiques Treasury(New York, Dutton, 1959) has useful information and many illustrations of furniture and other furnishings in Williamsburg and in a number of other American museums and restorations.

As to the craftsmen themselves and their life in colonial times, the first place to look is Ethel Hall Bjerkoe,The Cabinetmakers of America(Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, 1957); and for light on the general, social, and economic status of craft workers Carl Bridenbaugh,The Colonial Craftsman(New York, N. Y. Univ. Press, 1950) will be found helpful.Seat of Empire, by the same author; Hunter D. Farish, editor,The Journal ... of Philip Vickers Fithian; and Edmund S. Morgan,Virginians at Home(all published by Colonial Williamsburg, in 1950, 1958, and 1952 respectively) will provide lively background for the local phases of the picture.

The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburgis based largely on an unpublished monograph by Mills Brown, formerly of the Colonial Williamsburg research staff. It has been prepared with the assistance of Thomas K. Ford, editor, Colonial Williamsburg publications department. Benjamin Bucktrout’s bill to Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, quoted onpage 12, is printed by permission of the Virginia Historical Society.

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